Meet the Newest Pokémon Battle Team Member: Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum

In what either came as a complete shock or made perfect sense, the official Pokémon YouTube channel announced last week that the Japanese media titan partially owned by Nintendo will be teaming up with Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. The as-yet-undetailed collaboration set to launch on September 28.

Assume there will be merch, lots of it.

The video featured two Pokémon stars, Pikachu and Eevee, gleefully running through field of sunflowers under a bright blue sky filled with clouds so puffy you could make a smore out of them. Windmills spin in the distance.

Suddenly, a drop of blue something—paint, perhaps—falls from the sky and lands on Pikachu’s head.

The creatures look up to sky and see the clouds, sun, and sky turn impasto. The field of sunflowers, Pikachu and Eevee notice, has turned into bubbly, smiling Sunflora, a type of Pokémon introduced in Generation 2.

The Sunflora bounce their way toward Pikachu and Eevee, and the scene closes on a white screen with logos for both Pokémon and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The Pokémon Company, which manages the Pokémon property for its three owners, Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures, has been tight-lipped about what to expect from the collaboration, promising only “more information coming soon.” However, after a few seconds, we are given what may be an easter egg of sorts for what lays ahead. 

Thirty seconds into the advert, and for only four seconds, the two logos move aside. In the center of the screen is a version of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) that bears a striking resemblance to the painting held by the UK’s National Gallery. Of course, the center flower has been replaced with a cheerful Sunflora, grinning petal to petal.